Saturday, January 28, 2017

Our national carrier plays very successfully on its image as
an airline that does things a bit differently from others. It’s the plucky little
airline that could.

We’re supposed to see Air New Zealand as quirky – a bit “out
there”. Its “brand” is encapsulated in those famous safety videos,
which are cited as evidence of Air New Zealand’s sense of fun, and in its habit
of changing its livery to cash in on whatever’s trending, whether it’s the Rugby
World Cup or The Lord of the Rings.

Myself, I can’t stand those smug, gimmicky videos, but we’re
expected to love them. It’s almost a requirement of citizenship. Air New
Zealand has so carefully aligned itself with Brand New Zealand that it’s
unpatriotic not to think it’s the coolest little airline on the planet.

But the flip side of the airline’s corporate persona is that
it can be bossy, authoritarian and a bit anal. It’s the schizoid, bad-tempered
clown that can turn nasty if you don’t laugh at its jokes.

Property investor Sir Bob Jones and broadcaster Gary
McCormick have both fallen foul of the airline for not complying with what
Jones trenchantly calls its infantile nanny-statism. Both were banished to the
naughty corner.

Jones ended up buying his own plane. McCormick has been
banned for two years, an extraordinary act of arrogant corporate bullying that he intends to challenge.

I banned myself from flying Air New Zealand if I could
possibly avoid it after an experience several years ago when I was booked on an
afternoon flight to Sydney. I had to catch a bus to Canberra and made sure I had
hours to spare, because experience had taught me to expect delays.

So it turned out. As the afternoon wore on, I sat through
countless announcements of delayed departure times. I can’t recall precisely
what reason was given: “servicing requirements” or “engineering requirements”
or one of those familiar bland excuses that airlines use to cover up their slackness.

At one stage we were grudgingly given vouchers for the
airport café, the value of which seemed to have been fixed so as to ensure we
couldn’t actually buy anything edible. Otherwise the airline’s ground staff were characteristically
missing in action.

In the event, our flight arrived in Sydney several hours
late. I missed the last bus by minutes and had to make hurried arrangements to
spend the night in Sydney, at considerable inconvenience both to me and the
people who were expecting me in Canberra.

But what lingers in my mind was what happened when it became
obvious, halfway across the Tasman, that I was at risk of missing my
connection.

I approached three flight attendants who were idly chatting
at the front of the cabin. I wanted to ask if they happened to know where the
bus pickup point was at Sydney Airport – a piece of information that might save
me vital minutes – or, failing that, whether they could suggest any other way
of getting to Canberra at that late hour.

As they saw me approach, their conversation ceased and their
demeanour changed. They looked at me with a mixture of alarm and suspicion. A
passenger, doubtless wanting something ... a problem, in other words.

When the most senior of the attendants opened her mouth to
speak to me, it wasn’t to ask how she could help. It was to reprimand me, in
headmistressy tones, for stepping across a line on the floor of the cabin
beyond which passengers weren’t permitted. It seems I could have been a hijacker
trying to get into the cockpit.

She had all the charm of an SS concentration camp guard. Needless
to say I hadn’t noticed the line on the floor (who would?) and had no idea I had
suddenly become a security risk. No matter. Rules are rules, and I had to be
put in my place.

It was one of those moments when you’re so taken aback that
you don’t think of an appropriately witty response until much later. (The
French have a term for this: l’esprit
d’escalier.) But I proceeded to seek the flight attendants’ advice anyway.

They not only couldn’t help me, but showed no interest in
doing so. In fact they reacted as if it was downright impertinent of me to interrupt
their chatter, although it was their airline that had caused my predicament.

Such things stick in your mind for years. It became my defining Air New Zealand moment, even
superseding the memorable time my luggage – and that of most other passengers –
was removed from an Air New Zealand flight to Tonga without our knowledge because the plane was
overweight. The pilot casually informed us of this only when we were halfway to
our destination.

Everyone has their negative airline stories, but almost all
of mine involve Air New Zealand. It's an airline that does
a lot of things well, but it often appears unwilling to accept responsibility for the
inconvenience it creates for passengers when it fouls things up.

That’s how McCormick fell out with the airline. He had been
stuffed around by flight delays and decided that the least Air New Zealand could do
was allow him a glass of wine in the Koru Club as a quid pro quo, even though he wasn’t a member.

I understand his exasperation, but that's not the way things work with Air New Zealand. It determines the rules, and unfortunately they don't include anything about getting passengers to their destinations on time or recompensing them if it fails to do so.

In Jones’ case, the circumstances were different. His argument with the airline arose from a flight attendant’s by-the-rulebook
insistence that he read the instructions for passengers travelling in the
emergency row, though he says he’d flown in the same seat countless times
before.

Reading Jones’ description of the hatchet-faced flight
attendant who marched off to report him to the captain, I couldn’t help
wondering whether it was the same woman I’d encountered on my flight to Sydney.
Certainly it sounded as if she had the same schoolmarm-ish demeanour.

Now here’s the thing. People will say that aviation safety requires
that instructions be obeyed. But Air New Zealand’s preoccupation with enforcing
the rules, and punishing rebellious souls like McCormick and Jones, would be
more tolerable if it were matched by concern for passengers whose travel is
disrupted by the airline’s own failings. But it isn’t.

The airline insists on passengers complying with instructions,
but often fails to fulfil its reciprocal obligations toward them. You're at their mercy.

It’s a lop-sided relationship in which one party expects
passengers to meekly do as they’re told, but doesn’t always keep its side of
the bargain – and incurs no penalty for failing to do so. There’s no naughty
corner for unaccountable, anonymous airline employees when planes run late or
are cancelled.

I know of other regular fliers who avoid Air New Zealand if
they possibly can, although it’s not easy in a country where one airline enjoys
such overwhelming dominance. If Jones and McCormick want to form a club, I’m
sure there’d be plenty of starters.

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, January 25.)

This was going to be a column
about The Warehouse, but somehow it’s mutated into one about Greytown.

For the benefit of readers
who have never been there, Greytown is a picturesque (some would say quaint) Wairarapa
town with a population of roughly 2000.

In the past couple of decades
it has become highly desirable as a bolt-hole for the elite of Wellington,
which is little more than an hour’s drive away.

I say “weekend retreat”, but
some people who bought weekend cottages there liked it so much they subsequently moved there
permanently. The Wairarapa is full of affluent refugees from Wellington, but
nowhere more so than Greytown.

Dame Fran Wilde has a place
there. So does the man who succeeded her as chair of the Wellington Regional
Council, former All Black Chris Laidlaw. Other residents include former top
public servants, arty types and high-profile professionals.

They are drawn to Greytown by
its relaxed pace, its attractive old buildings and its “villagey” atmosphere,
not to mention the convenience of being a relatively short drive from
Wellington yet enjoying a much nicer climate and a more congenial lifestyle.

Smart cafes, pricey furniture
shops and up-market fashion boutiques line the main street. One entrepreneur
even hauled an old two-storey wooden railways administration building across the Remutaka
Hill from the Hutt
Valley in six pieces, reassembled it and gave it a second life as the White
Swan Country Hotel.

Paradoxically, Greytown
acquired its charm partly as a result of historical neglect. When the Wairarapa
railway line was built in the late 19th century, it bypassed
Greytown. That meant development stalled there, whereas nearby Featherston and
Carterton, both of which were on the railway route, surged ahead.

But it also meant that
Greytown’s buildings were preserved pretty much in their original Victorian
state, because there was no money to be made by tearing them down and building new
ones. As a result, Greytown today is visually a lot more appealing than
its neighbouring towns with their mish-mash of architectural styles.

For my taste, Greytown is a
bit Midsomer, if you get my drift. I’m not suggesting grotesque murders
regularly occur there, as in the TV town, but it’s cute, and there’s a certain
social homogeneity. I call it a Decile 10 town, whereas
Masterton, where I live, which is a bit further up State Highway 2, is
definitely Decile 1-10.

So how did I get onto the
subject of Greytown? Ah yes, The Warehouse.

I was going to write a column
about the beneficial impact of The Warehouse on low-income New Zealanders.
There’s a lot of opposition to so-called “Big Box’ retailers, but I recently
stumbled across a Massey University research paper, published in 2007, which argued persuasively
that The Warehouse had been good for low-income people, and particularly for
Maori.

It had always been my
impression that The Warehouse performed a socially and economically useful
function by putting a wide range of products, often of good quality, within
reach of people with limited disposable income.

The Massey paper not only
confirmed as much, but also revealed that the company had a reputation for
being good to its staff. Maori employees reported that they were treated well
and given opportunities for advancement.

The Massey paper referred
specifically to controversy in the wealthy Northland town of Kerikeri when the
company proposed to open a store there roughly a decade ago.

Many of the predominantly
Pakeha residents wanted Kerikeri to remain an “up-market” town. They were worried that The Warehouse would have a negative impact on the town's image.

Local Maori, however, were firmly in favour of The Warehouse opening a local branch because the existing Kerikeri shops were too
pricey and they had to drive all the way to Kaitaia to find stuff they could
afford.

And that brings me back to
Greytown. Because when The Warehouse announced last October that it planned to
open a temporary summer store in Greytown, there was a similar reaction. A
local retailers’ spokesman protested that the “red-shed” brand didn’t fit the
town’s image as a “quality and distinctive shopping destination”.

I drove past the temporary
Warehouse store in Greytown just the other day. It’s very low-key. You have to
look hard to see it, notwithstanding the red paint, so perhaps the local
retailers were being over-sensitive. In any case it’s on the outskirts of town,
so the local boutiques won’t be contaminated by its presence.

But here’s the thing: There
didn’t seem to be anybody there. I’d noticed the same thing previously when I’d
gone past.

What can we infer from this?
Perhaps the people of Greytown are signalling, in a gentle way, that The
Warehouse doesn’t really belong there. Or perhaps it’s the market saying
there’s a right place for everything, and The Warehouse no more belongs in a
town like Greytown than a BMW showroom belongs in Shannon or Takaka.

On the other hand, there may
be no conclusions to be drawn at all. But in the meantime, readers of this
column might have learned a little bit more about Greytown, a little bit more
about The Warehouse, and maybe even something about human nature too.

Footnote: In what I suppose could be seen as a happy compromise, The Warehouse did establish an outlet at Waipapa, near Kerikeri - close enough to satisfy price-conscious local shoppers, but sufficiently distant to leave Kerikeri's exclusive image intact.

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

I ask that question for a couple of reasons. The first was a
speech that Sir Gerald Hensley gave late last year.

Hensley was head of the Prime Minister’s Department under
Lange and thus uniquely positioned to observe him. The picture he painted of
Lange’s behaviour during the showdown with the United States over nuclear warships
was not flattering.

Before I go any further, I should mention that I was
delirious with pleasure when Lange’s Labour government was elected in 1984.

Sir Robert Muldoon had cast a malevolent shadow over New
Zealand since 1975. He was a bully who succeeded politically by polarising New Zealanders
along them-and-us lines, never more so than at the time of the 1981 Springbok
rugby tour.

In Lange he faced, for the first time, an opponent he
couldn’t handle. Lange seemed impervious to Muldoon’s method of attack, responding
with sparkling eloquence and insouciant wit.

As prime minister, Lange appeared to champion New Zealand’s
right to repudiate nuclear weapons. Many New Zealanders experienced a surge of nationalistic
pride at the way he stood up to pressure from Washington to accept visits from
American warships.

Peak pride came with Lange’s performance in the celebrated
Oxford Union debate of 1985, when he argued that nuclear weapons were morally
indefensible. He famously told his opponent, the American televangelist Jerry
Falwell, that he could smell the uranium on Falwell’s breath.

Lange was in his element. He was a performer who loved to
charm people with his humour and verbal dexterity. I was in Britain at the time
and recall feeling quietly pleased that New Zealand and its charismatic prime
minister were being noticed and admired internationally for taking an
independent line.

But as Hensley has revealed, Lange was talking out both
sides of his mouth – saying one thing to New Zealanders and another to our
allies.

In public, he was pledging to honour Labour’s commitment to
ban nuclear weapons and nuclear propulsion. But behind the scenes, he was
assuring America and our other Anzus treaty partner, Australia, that he would make
the problem go away.

As Hensley tells it, the Americans were genuinely disposed
to seek an amicable and mutually honourable solution, but in the end became so
exasperated with Lange’s duplicity that they spat the dummy. He even kept his
own Cabinet in the dark.

When a crisis arose over a proposed visit by the ageing destroyer
USS Buchanan, carefully selected by the Americans to avoid the suspicion that
it might be nuclear-armed, Lange disappeared to a remote Pacific atoll and was
out of touch for eight days.

When, later, the visit was barred to satisfy anti-nuke activists in the Labour Party, the Americans justifiably
felt deceived. Richard Prebble, a member of Lange's Cabinet, later described it as a
shambles.

Hensley gives the impression Lange was counting on verbal
equivocation to muddle through, but ended up painting himself into a corner.
Far from being a courageous champion of the anti-nuclear cause, he was a
dissembler who tried to play a double game – and when it failed, tried to make
himself invisible.

Small wonder that Lange subsequently decided politics was
too much like hard work and quit, leaving Geoffrey Palmer with the hopeless job
of trying to prevent the faction-ridden fourth Labour government from
unravelling.

So Lange was a charming political dilettante. But I said at
the start of this column that there were two reasons to reassess his legacy.
Here’s the other: plagiarism.

Whatever his failings (and in his later life Lange showed a
bitter, disputatious streak), we at least admired his wit.

Wasn’t it he, after all, who once joked that New Zealand was
“a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica”. Yes, he did – but I recently
discovered that the line was originally used by US Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger in 1970, in reference to Chile.

All right then. But how about Lange’s memorable line that
National leader Jim Bolger had “gone around the country stirring up apathy”?

Whoops. That was borrowed from British Conservative Party stalwart Willie
Whitelaw, who used the line in reference to Labour leader Harold Wilson.

As far as I can ascertain, the line about Falwell’s
uranium-enriched breath was Lange’s own. So was the one about Muldoon’s
knighthood in 1984: “After a long year we’ve got a very short knight”. But you
have to wonder about the provenance of some of Lange’s other witticisms.

More to the point, Hensley's recollections about the Anzus crisis suggest that being prime minister requires more than an endless supply of one-liners.

Footnote: Since this column was published, I've been reminded that the famous "uranium on your breath" comment was directed not at Falwell personally, but at a young member of his debating team. More significantly, Gerald Hensley has revealed that it was indeed not Lange's line originally. Hensley had spotted it in an Australian cartoon (he thinks it was in The Bulletin) and pointed it out to Lange, thinking it would amuse him.

Monday, January 16, 2017

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, January 11.)

I walked past a big 1970s-era
Chrysler Valiant in town the other day – an orange one (still the original
paint job, I’d guess) with a tan vinyl roof.

I’ve driven such cars. They
handled like a wheelbarrow half-filled with water. But I’ll tell you what: they
had character. They had personality. When you drove a Chrysler Valiant, you
knew you were driving a Chrysler Valiant.

I contrast this with the
occasions when I hire a modern rental car. I couldn’t tell you what I’m driving
without looking at the logo in the centre of the steering wheel.

They all feel and look the
same. They’re safe, well-equipped, economical, reliable … and boring.

I thought of that Chrysler
Valiant a couple of days later when I was reading the motoring section of my
paper. It included a story about the new Holden Commodore due to be released
next year – the first
Commodore not to be built in Australia.

Holden had released advanced
publicity shots of the new model from different angles. To me it looked
virtually indistinguishable from the equivalent model Mazda, Hyundai or Kia.

Say what you like about the
Chrysler Valiant, but it was unmistakeably a Chrysler Valiant. There was no way
you’d mistake it for its competitors, the Ford Falcon and the Holden Kingswood
(each of which, in turn, looked completely different from the other).

And before you say anything,
yes, I know your chance of getting killed was far greater if you crashed in a
1975 Valiant or Holden Kingswood than if you have a prang in a modern Honda or
Subaru.

In that respect, I concede
we’ve made enormous advances. But did safety improvements have to come at the
expense of the styling quirks that gave the cars of earlier eras their
individuality?

Allow me to illustrate my
point. On Facebook recently, my friend Phil O'Brien, co-host of Radio New Zealand's popular Matinee Idle, posted a 1957 magazine advertisement for
a car identical to the first one he owned – an eggshell-blue Austin A50
Cambridge.

Phil invited other people to
contribute reminiscences about their own first cars. There were 113 responses,
many of them very witty.

They covered a weird and
wonderful assortment of makes and models that people of a certain age would
remember well, from the everyday (Austin A30s, Vanguards, Vauxhall Veloxes,
Triumph Heralds, Holden Specials, Morris Minors and Ford Prefects) to the
slightly more exotic and racy (a Renault 750, a Jowett Javelin and an Auto
Union – precursor of the Audi).

There were some that few
people with any self-esteem would admit to having owned (namely, a 1970s Morris
Marina and a Skoda Octavia wagon from the 1960s). But the point was that for a
couple of days, people indulged in an entertaining nostalgia-fest about old
cars.

Now ask yourself: can you
imagine anyone getting similarly excited in 50 years’ time about peas-in-a-pod
Ford, Mazdas and Toyotas? I can’t.

Good cars, all of them, but
dull. With globalisation, the “world car” that motor companies started talking about
in the 1970s became a reality. Lookalike models roll off assembly lines on
every continent.

Old cars were quirky. That’s
why people gather wherever classic or vintage cars are on display. Small wonder
that Nelson publishers Potton and Burton recently brought out We Had One of Those!, a wallow in automotive
nostalgia written by Stephen Barnett.

Would any relentlessly profit-driven
car multinational today allow its engineers and designers to create something
as eccentric as the lowlight Morris Minor, the Morgan three-wheeler or the
Hillman Imp? It just wouldn’t happen.

And here’s another thing
about modern car design. In some ways it has regressed, in both practical and
aesthetic terms.

Design orthodoxy demands a
rising waistline and a passenger compartment that tapers sharply towards the rear.
As a result, window space is greatly reduced for back-seat passengers and the
rear view is so restricted that drivers become almost wholly dependent on the
reversing camera to see what’s going on behind them. And they call this
progress?

Few cars demonstrate the
regression better than the royal family’s vehicle of choice, the Range Rover.

Like its humble older sibling
the Land Rover, the Range Rover was revolutionary when it was launched in 1970.
It was the world’s first luxury four-wheel-drive and a masterpiece of design.

It had clean, simple lines. The
driver sat high, surrounded by acres of glass. Reliability may have occasionally
been an issue, but visibility certainly wasn’t.

Now look at one of its
descendants, the Range Rover Evoque. It looks as if something very large has
sat on it. It has a squashed look, with a rear window that resembles one of
those narrow slits that soldiers shove their rifles through.

The big-selling Toyota Corolla,
too, has morphed into something that resembles a particularly nasty insect.
It’s not even quirky-ugly in the way that, say, the 1970s Leyland P76 was.

Now there was a car that was
so ugly it was strangely desirable. They don’t make ’em like that anymore, and
more’s the pity.

My wife found it lying in the garden by the compost bin. It
was hard to see, its mottled breast feathers providing perfect camouflage in
the undergrowth.

It was a Californian quail, one of two that we’d become
accustomed to seeing around the place. Sadly, nature hadn’t disguised it well
enough to save it from one of the neighbourhood cats.

It could only have been a cat that killed it. As far as I’m
aware, healthy quail are not in the habit of spontaneously lying down and
dying.

Besides, the cats around our place have previous form. Two
summers ago, our garden became home to another pair of quail. They were welcome visitors and we did our
best to make them feel at home.

Mr and Mrs Quail produced seven chicks. We were proud of our quail family and felt
like proxy parents. But then the inevitable happened.

I found the bodies of two quail chicks lying on the lawn. Of
the rest of the family, there was no sign.

After several days, the adult birds reappeared by
themselves. We assumed that cats had got all the chicks.

They would have killed out of instinct, not necessity. The cats we see are well-fed and don’t need juvenile
quail to supplement their diet.

Prior to this I’d harboured no ill-feeling toward cats. We
don’t own one, but our section is treated as common ground by all the
neighbours’ cats and we constantly see them around.

One took to lurking under the concealing foliage of a
weeping Japanese maple, from where it would ambush any bird that came within
striking distance. A pile of feathers on the lawn would tell the story.

I could tolerate that. One blackbird less, when our garden
is overpopulated with them anyway, didn’t bother me. But the quail chicks were
a different story.

At that point I began to have some sympathy for Gareth
Morgan’s campaign for controls on domestic cats. But he’s got it only half
right, because cats can be a pest for other reasons besides their blood lust.

We often encounter cat excrement in the garden. It’s not
only foul-smelling, but potentially dangerous because it can transmit the
parasitic disease toxoplasmosis.

My resent-o-meter was cranked up a further couple of notches
recently when a cat started making itself comfortable at night on an outside
settee. It left evidence of its sleepovers in the form of ineradicable stains
on the cushions.

All this has left me feeling slightly jaundiced toward cats
when previously I had no feelings about them one way or another. But what do you
do? Cats are unique among domestic pets in that they defy normal means of
control.

Unlike dogs, they are impervious to human commands.
Paradoxically, we require dogs to be chained or otherwise confined, while cats
enjoy licence to roam at will. Why the double standard?

One solution would be for cats to be kept in cages or
hutches, like rabbits, but you can imagine the outcry that would provoke. Cats
are one of those red-button issues – like 1080 and fluoridation – that reduce
otherwise rational people to a state of borderline hysteria.

In any case I have to admit that, even with my hostile
feelings toward the cats that kill our quail and soil our cushions, the dogs in
our neighbourhood irritate me even more. And this from a dog lover.

Our neighbours’ dogs don’t have to come on to our property
to drive me mad, and they never run loose. They just yap. And yap. And yap.

Some noises you can put up with. A lawnmower or chainsaw
somewhere in the neighbourhood is acceptable because it’s serving a purpose,
and you know it’s going to stop when the job’s finished.

No, the noises that set people’s teeth on edge are those
that are avoidable, like boy-racers, Harley-Davidsons and yapping dogs.

These noises are a public nuisance and an invasion of
privacy. But the yapping dogs in my neighbourhood pose a conundrum almost as
vexing as that of how to control cats.

The conundrum is this. I like my neighbours and have a good
relationship with them. They are exemplary in every respect but one.

The thing I’ve never worked out is how to tell them, without
jeopardising neighbourhood harmony, that their dogs drive me mad.

I did once try shouting at the owner of one spectacularly
noisy dog whose barking was disturbing the Sunday afternoon tranquillity. It was pitifully ineffective. The owner couldn’t hear me
because of the noise his dog was making.

Footnote: If part of this column seems familiar, it's because a couple of paragraphs originally appeared in a column written for the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.